PrivadoVPN Review

PrivadoVPN has a safe privacy policy

We’ve studied the PrivadoVPN privacy policy and here is everything PrivadoVPN logs:

• Account information (username and email address)
• Payment information
• Support messages
• Anonymous, aggregate statistics (number of active users over a period of time)
• Mobile identifiers (these can switched off)
• Total amount of bandwidth used

PrivadoVPN only collects a small amount of information, and all of it is unidentifiable.

The service doesn’t log anything sensitive, such as your IP address or the websites you visit. The only information the Swiss authorities could possibly obtain is your email address and username.

Nevertheless, PrivadoVPN should commission a third-party audit to verify its claims. This has become standard practice in the VPN industry, and provides an added layer of trust.

PrivadoVPN is based in Switzerland

PrivadoVPN is based in Zug, Switzerland, registered as Privado Networks AG.

Switzerland is a good choice of country to establish a VPN company, because of its robust privacy laws that respect consumer privacy. It’s not a member of the European Union, so it doesn’t abide by the Data Retention Directive.

Moreover, Switzerland has no role in the intrusive 14 Eyes alliance, or any other anti-privacy intelligence sharing agreements.

In other words, PrivadoVPN is in fact under no legal obligation to store the data of its subscribers.

While Switzerland has local surveillance laws in place, these only apply to ISPs (Internet Service Providers), and not VPN services.

Who owns PrivadoVPN?

PrivadoVPN offers little to no public information about its corporate structure or ownership.

Some users may respect a privacy company wanting privacy of its own, others may want more transparency before trusting the company with their data.

For this reason, we’d like to see greater transparency and disclosure from the company that operates PrivadoVPN.

Using PrivadoVPN’s automatic protocol selection, our speeds dropped just 8% when connected to nearby VPN servers.

This is a small speed loss, although PrivadoVPN is simply not as fast as competitors like NordVPN, which only records a 1% speed loss.

Having said that, on local connections PrivadoVPN is more than fast enough for you to stream in 4K and download files quickly.

We tested a wide range of PrivadoVPN servers, including long-distance ones, and these were the speed results:

International Speed Test Results

PrivadoVPN’s worldwide speeds are just as impressive as its local ones. While there will always be greater speed reduction connecting to countries further away, PrivadoVPN’s international speed loss was minimal.

Connecting from the UK to the US, we only experienced a 15% speed loss. That’s one of the smallest speed drops we’ve seen for London to New York connections.

Likewise, connecting to an Australia server only reduced our internet speed by 37%. Considering the huge distance, this is remarkable.

PrivadoVPN Free Speed Test Results

We also tested the speeds of PrivadoVPN’s free servers, both locally and globally.

PrivadoVPN Free performed just as highly as the paid version in our speed tests. It’s clear that PrivadoVPN doesn’t speed throttle its free servers, with little-to-no server congestion.

In the UK and Germany, the free VPN’s speeds were even higher than the premium version. Long-distance speeds into the USA were impressive, too.

We tested PrivadoVPN with major streaming platforms to see if it works to access geo-restricted content. Here are our results:

PrivadoVPN unblocks US and UK Netflix

PrivadoVPN is a good solution to bypass Netflix geo-blocks. In our streaming tests, the VPN streamed video content from the US and UK library.

However, the VPN fails to unblock other important Netflix regions, like Germany, Japan, and Canada.

The best Netflix VPNs can unblock over 30 international libraries. PrivadoVPN is a long way from this.

BBC iPlayer access is inconsistent

PrivadoVPN didn’t unblock BBC iPlayer on its Manchester server, but it did work on its London server – for a while. Coming back to test it again shortly afterward, our real location was detected by the BBC’s blocking technology.

PrivadoVPN is inconsistent when it comes to BBC iPlayer. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. As such, use a more effective BBC iPlayer VPN, instead.

We also unblocked All 4 using PrivadoVPN, but not ITV Player. Again, fans of British TV should try more reliable VPNs that give you a UK IP address.

Works with HBO Max, Disney+, and Hulu

On the plus side, PrivadoVPN can unblock other popular streaming services, like HBO Max, Disney+, Hulu, and the American Amazon Prime Video catalog.

This is impressive compared to the majority of free VPN services.

Despite unblocking many content platforms, the lack of identifiable streaming servers is problematic. You’re left to guess which servers work with each streaming platform through time-consuming trial and error.

And once you find a server that works with your chosen streaming app, the PrivadoVPN app doesn’t let you favorite that server for future use.

All in all, PrivadoVPN is good at unblocking geo-restricted video content, but there are much better streaming VPNs available.

Select ‘Stream Content’ When Signing Up

When you install PrivadoVPN, you will be presented with options to ‘Find The Best Server Configuration’. If you do not select ‘Stream Content,’ you will not be connected to streaming-optimized servers and will struggle to access streaming sites.

If you’ve already signed up to PrivadoVPN and are experiencing streaming issues, contact PrivadoVPN’s support team and ask to have a streaming-optimized account activated.

PrivadoVPN Free unblocks most streaming platforms

PrivadoVPN’s free version is the best free VPN for American Netflix. Using its 10GB of free data, we unblocked the UK and US Netflix libraries.

We also unblocked HBO Max, Hulu, and BBC iPlayer.

Like with the premium version, PrivadoVPN Free couldn’t get around ITV Player blocks. And with only 10GB of data per month, streaming time is limited.

PrivadoVPN is quite open and supportive of its users engaging in P2P (peer-to-peer) file sharing. It has built a network that supports P2P and SOCKS5 proxy on every server.

The SOCKS5 proxy is a favorite of torrenters as it can allow for faster speeds and greater anonymity. This feature is limited to paying subscribers only, though. You can access your SOCKS5 proxy credentials via your PrivadoVPN account page.

PrivadoVPN has a working kill switch and a private logging policy – if you’re a torrenter you can rest assured that your file sharing is anonymous.

Industry-standard security

PrivadoVPN offers a good package of VPN security. It uses the industry-standard AES-256 encryption, and we expect nothing less from a quality VPN.

You can choose between OpenVPN, WireGuard, and IKEv2 on the Windows, Android, and iOS apps but not macOS – which we would like to see in the future.

Using our leak test tool, we recorded no accidental exposure of any kind, including webRTC, IP, or DNS leaks. This means that PrivadoVPN is doing a good job encrypting and protecting your connection.

PrivadoVPN’s kill switch works

PrivadoVPN has a very good kill switch. Just turning it on without connecting to a VPN server will stop your entire internet connection. This is very useful should your VPN connection drop, ensuring no sensitive data is ever exposed.

However, as long as the PrivadoVPN kill switch is on you cannot use your internet at all, whether you’re connected to a PrivadoVPN server or not.

Most other VPN kill switches kill your internet only if it detects a VPN connection drop. This makes PrivadoVPN extra safe, and encourages you to always be connected to a secure server. Windscribe also has this type of kill switch.

Lacking advanced security tools

PrivadoVPN is safe, but it doesn’t have many extra security features. This is good if you’re looking for a ‘click and protect’ service, but some of the most popular VPNs, like NordVPN and Surfshark, come with ad blockers, split tunneling, diskless RAM servers, and much more.

We didn’t expect PrivadoVPN to work as an anti-censorship VPN. There are no extra tools or options within the app that are usually required to beat Chinese censorship, like traffic obfuscation or a stealth VPN protocol.

To our surprise, PrivadoVPN worked to get around the Great Firewall of China when connected to its Taiwan and Japan server. We tested this from our very own server in Shanghai, so we can confirm that PrivadoVPN currently works in China.

However, connections took a long time to establish. As you can see in the video below, while we managed to unblock YouTube on the Taiwan server, it took over four minutes to get around the Firewall (we have shortened the video). We experienced identical connection waits with the Tokyo server too.

It’s not clear how long PrivadoVPN’s success in China will last. It doesn’t have any special obfuscation technology like Astrill VPN – which has bypassed China’s website blocks 100% of the time for more than a year now.

As PrivadoVPN gets more popular, it’s more likely the Chinese authorities will identify and block it.

PrivadoVPN has a live chat feature that it says is available 24/7. However, it’s actually available at completely random and unpredictable times. Sometimes we’ve sought help and been answered instantly, and other times it has taken hours.

We asked PrivadoVPN why live chat isn’t always available and it told us:

“All of our support runs 24/7 unless our agents are currently unavailable.”

This was frustrating, so we used a ticket system on its website instead. We sent the ticket at 14:27 and got a response at 16:07 – nearly a two hour waiting window. The response was polite and helpful enough, though.

The website has some basic FAQs (mainly used to promote the service) and a few helpful setup guides, as well as some articles on general privacy, but it’s far removed from the sort of comprehensive online help you get from a VPN like Hide.me.